ARM's East cites power as key IC design driver

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – The prospect of both climate change and
"unsustainable" data growth means engineers should focus on reducing power consumption in their device designs, according to Warren
East, CEO of ARM

In an ARM
TechCon keynote here Thursday (Nov. 1), East sketched a future
of vastly different design considerations that span everything from
servers and cloud infrastructure to the billions of devices
that will comprise the Internet of Things. East also used the
keynote to announce that ARM is becoming a promoter member of the
Weightless Special Interest Group that was originally created by
Neul Ltd., a startup company that also comes from Cambridge, England.

East (right, projected on a stage screen) was joined onstage by George Grey, CEO of
the non-profit Linaro software organization and Judson Althoff,
senior vice president at Oracle Corp., who helped show off ARM's energy efficiency credentials and partnership
model.

While power consumption will increase as
the number of users increase and devices proliferate, designers can focus on other areas to cut usage .East said electric motors consume 50 percent of the world's
electricity, and any efficiency improvement there would yield big benefits. Similarly, lighting consumes about 20 percent of global electricity
production while IT and communications accounts for about 10 percent of global consumption.

"ARM is built on
energy-efficient fundamental technology and partnership," said East.
As an example of how ARM's technology can help save power, East claimed
that simply moving a computing function from desktop to a tablet
computer can cut power usage.

@wsw1982. Watch out. You are in the wrong place. This is ARMTimes (aka EETimes) and you cant say anything bad about ARM. Even though the Exynos in your Chromebook is sucky and consumes about 10W, you cant say anything negative.

It's funny that at the mean time ARM is losing in power efficiency. The Samsung Exynos 5 is power hungry in both Cromebook and Nexus 5. The ARMy smartphones consume more power than the medfield phones. The ARM's arguments are always about the maximum performance and idle power consumption, while the others about both the full load performance and top power consumption.

I visited TI's Kilby labs a while back and they were doing all kinds of experiments with motors to reduce power consumption. It was fascinating, because you don't often think of semiconductor firms doing motor research... but low power needs are pushing the big players into those spaces